Red Hat EL 4.0 Released

diegocgteleline.es writes "As it has been noticed by some news sites, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 has been released. RedHat's web site doesn't seem to have any reference, but with Red Hat being probably the most used distro in the enterprise and featuring for first time a 2.6 kernel, this is a major milestone for linux in the server arena. There're already some reviews."

Comments

Linux 2.6

[Turmio]

I hate to disappoint you, but Linux 2.6 used in RedHat 4 enterprise distributions hardly makes it a major milestone in the Linux server arena. Enterprise Linux distributions with Linux 2.6 kernel is not exactly a ground breaking thing. SUSE LINUX Enterprise 9 featuring Linux 2.6 was released many months ago. Also the 2.4 kernel used in the 3 series of RedHat enterprise distributions isn't quite vanilla 2.4. It contains already many, many features backported from Linux 2.6.

Re:Linux 2.6

[crow]

It is significant for everyone who uses Linux. While most other distributions have been using 2.6 for a while now, Red Hat is what the big corporations pay attention to. This means that people who develop software for Linux can no longer point to Red Hat as an excuse for not supporting 2.6.

In other words, the whole world can now pretty much agree that the 2.4 kernel and the software that runs on it is in maintenance mode now.

A couple things...

[Ayanami Rei]

1) Fedora-like desktop. Of particular note: memory keys are auto-mounted thanks to dbus/HAL support and udev

2) Ability to use selinux MAC and auditing

3) New versions of OO, gimp, gtk, moz out of thje box...

4) Aaaand... there's not much else that stands out. Most stuff that works on 3 will work on 4 and vice versa, maybe requiring a SRPM re-build. It looks pretty much the same, still bluecurve with some tweaks. Not that it doesn't look good.

Red Hat!

[Anonymous Coward]

*looks down*

*smiles*

*shakes head*

Ol' Red Hat. Heh. Didn't know people were still usin' it.

*low whistle*

I remember that one time my RPM database got wedged in the middle of a critical glibc upgrade. Let me tell you, them admins didn't like being paged at 4 in the AM. But that's how it was with ol' Red Hat.

And that time I tried to install a customized version of PHP. I just wanted to change one little line in the config for a client. But I had to hunt down and install 12 different devel RPMs first. I didn't want no ODBC, but I had to compile it anyway. Then when I was done, it turned out I downloaded some with security holes. Why couldn't they just put all latest RPMs in a single directory so I could download them easy? That's how it was, with ol' Red Hat.

*looks whistfully into the distance*

*Yup, ol Red Hat. Wonder how she's doin' now. But don't get me wrong, it's over between us. We had some fun. But when her ass started gettin' big and she refused to go on a diet, and she still wore those ol' 1970's style hats when she new it looked stupid, well, that's when it was time to move on. I got a new love now. She does whatever I want and doesn't fight back. But that don't mean she ain't strong. Nooo sir. She just wants the same things I like. Stability. Ease of use. Flexibility. Ain't never seen a distro bend like she can. Whew!

What's that? No I ain't tellin' her name. I figgur, long as you're over there with Red Hat running PostgreSQL 5.0, kernel 2.2, and whatever else, trying to figure out how the heck a .spec file is supposed to look, and payin' through the nose for it, my business is already one step ahead a your'in.

Well, nice talkin' with you son. I best be movin' along. This ol' back a' mine don't take well to settin' still.

The Relevancy of RedHat

[Caydel]

Now, I am not trying to start a flamewar here, but how relevant is RedHat anymore these days?

Now, don't get me wrong, I used it for a long time, and I'm sure we all did. However, Redhat fell behind the times a few years ago, and many of us moved on to bigger and better things. ie. Fedora, Xandros, Debian, Mepis, Knoppix, etc.

So how relevant would you say Redhat is the Linux distro wars of this day and age?

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[wakejagr]

To the average linux user: not very.

To non computer geeks, who only hear about linux through mass media: almost as relevant as back in the day.

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[Leghkster]

With much (most?) commercial database, email, etc. server software supported only on RHEL in the past, it's the familiar comortable choice for businesses that have already jumped. Remember the "E" in RHEL. More often, recently, I see Suse officially supported, but that's often a harder sell to the bosses. They've heard of Red Hat by now. How do you pronounce that Suse thing? ;-)

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[Meetch]

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion.) If you're building your own box for your own purposes, and expect to be able to fix things yourself based on google/forums/friends, then don't go RedHat. It's too limited in scope for that. FC gets good support from their development framework, but again you don't need it. From what I see on a daily basis, RedHat's big plus is it's heavily certified with Oracle (and I'm not sure what else, because that really doesn't concern me in my work). There's only a few distros that have this support advantage, and RedHat was one of the first there. I'm fond of SuSE myself, but we can't justify going that way with the local support we can get if we have to.

As for making the jump from EL3 to EL4, well the main reasons IMHO are to dump all the backported patches made since EL3's inception first, going with packages a little less off-the-beaten-track, and then a few updates of things that help the job for frustrated admins. Little things like installing on logical volumes at the outset (long overdue!) and the nature of LVM 2, which allows taking multiple read-writable snapshots of any logical volume, and if lvcreate's usage is to believed, at some point we will be able to take snapshots of snapshots.

By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for. I like having a filesystem that genuinely allows for atomic disk transactions without any noticeable performance hit. But as has already been stated, RedHat aren't interested in supporting it. It's a real shame, but something we have to live with for now.

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[fm6]

By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for.

Ah, but you don't need a journalling file system to run Oracle, do you?

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you so sure that you are the "average linux user" anymore?

Flamebait or no, I'm guessing most RedHat users are the 7 Year+ UNIX Sysadmin guys and not the crowd trying to use Linux to watch WMV porno and play Halflife in their mom's basement.

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[diegocgteleline.es]

for geeks it is not of value For enterprises it's the leader. Debian and Fedora don't give you support when oracle runs slow.

Re:The Relevancy of RedHat

[sbennett]

By far RedHat's biggest failing IMO is the lack of support for ReiserFS - JFS and XFS would be nice for others, but the former is all I really care for. I like having a filesystem that genuinely allows for atomic disk transactions without any noticeable performance hit. But as has already been stated, RedHat aren't interested in supporting it. It's a real shame, but something we have to live with for now.

And they're not supporting it for good reason-- its extended attribute implementation is horrifically broken, and so it won't even mount on an SELinux system. IMHO (and a great many people share the same view), the increased security from SELinux is more important than the slight speed gain, especially at the expense of much higher CPU usage.

Compared to . . .?

[wakejagr]

From the article:

Conservative release cycles and a more exhaustive test cycle make Red Hat Enterprise Linux a safer bet for the business community--they don't have to chase the release of the week.

I guess they aren't comparing release cycles with Debian . . . maybe Longhorn?

All joking aside, I think RHEL isn't so much competing with other Linux distro's as with Windows. RedHat is trying to offer a choice to companies that are considering the jump away from MS: AS and ES for server machines and WS for workstations, solid support. I haven't used RH in a while, but I hear RPM hell isn't the "killer" app it used to be. Sounds like it's good competition for Windows.

Re:Compared to . . .?

[hdparm]

Well, it has ousted Sun from pretty much all of the big financial organisations and is making inroads elsewhere but not necessarily 'attacking' Windows. It will be long and hard battle in all places that have Windows AD installed - there still isn't open-source replacement for it out there. Hopefully, samba 4 will give us leverage on that end as well.

I personally can't make much sense in using commercial distros for replacing Windows in a small / medium enterprise market - much easier to sell is free (as in beer) OS. Plus, FC3 does the job well on a server and on a client side - it's been rock solid for my needs (file, print, squid, email mostly).

Re:Compared to . . .?

[IntlHarvester]

I think RHEL isn't so much competing with other Linux distro's as with Windows.

Not at all. RedHat is very happy staying in the "Enterprise Unix" niche -- J2EE, financial applications, Unix, Oracle. They're stealing business like mad from UNIX/RISC companies and barely acknowledge Microsoft. Who needs Main Street when you have Wall Street?

RedHat has done almost nothing to compete in the "LAN" or Windows server market -- file & print, directory services, groupware, RAD apps -- they've simply got no answer to this stuff. (SuSE/Novell at least is building a product lineup.)

Just to head off the kiddies....

[menscher]

Every time any /. article mentions RedHat, we get a bunch of kiddies attacking it. So, I propose a new rule: before attacking RHEL, please consider a few points:

• Do you have 5+ years of sysadmin experience?
• Do you have 100+ users?
• Do you have 10+ machines?
• Do you have to support enterprise applications?

Seriously, if you can't answer "yes" to all four questions, perhaps you should just keep your opinions to yourselves. The other distros are great for your mommy's basement, but in the enterprise, there are serious support/stability issues to consider.

Re:Just to head off the kiddies....

[LizardKing]

What does red hat do to make that same kernel so much more stable than kernel.org? If an application is screwing things over, logical step is to drop it.

RedHat does the kind of stress testing using common usage patterns and edge cases, and on a scale that loosely organised volunteers currently don't. I'm not saying that Debian (for example) couldn't come up with a project that does this kind of thing, but this is the area that RHEL appeals to (non-pointy haired) bosses.

The conservative release cycles of RHEL are because the users can't afford the downtime required by the frequency of Fedora upgrades (and Gentoo is a non-starter for enterprise users unless you're a masochist who likes getting ragged on by your boss when the system crawls during an emerge).

Well that's f*cked off the Debian and Gentoo amateurs ...

Re:Just to head off the kiddies....

[Erik Hensema]

It's the kernel. What does red hat do to make that same kernel so much more stable than kernel.org?

Red Hat properly tests the kernel and patches problems they find. Also, they add features which may be too intrusive for a stable kernel. Not because of code stability (as in: crashiness), but as in interface stability. But it's mostly the far better QA. Sane people don't run vanilla kernels on their production servers.

If an application is screwing things over, logical step is to drop it.

Now that's a innovative way to make your distribution stable! But what if said application is critical to the buisiness, like Oracle?

I'm thinking you are a red hat fan boy?

Red Hat has no fanboys. Fanboys are exclusively found on Gentoo, Debian and some on Slackware. All nice distributions, but all lacking good QA.

Re:Just to head off the kiddies....

[dtfinch]

All nice distributions, but all lacking good QA.

Wherever there is a demand for paid support, you'll find plenty of people and businesses willing to provide it. http://www.debian.org/consultants/

Re:Just to head off the kiddies....

[chez69]

you reported these kernel bugs, right?

since RHEL 4.0 is based on fedora core 3, the kernel in RHEL 4.0 will be almost mainline.

Re:Call me when...

[ag0ny]

[...]but RHEL is still missing a few things:

-Xen or virtualization solution like VMWare, Virtual Server, Solaris Zones

Excuse me? We're using VMware Workstation here, running on a Fedora Core 2 host.

Do your homework and read the specs. VMware has been running on Linux since ancient versions.

I think it's still premature

[Trevin]

I realize that Enterprise Linux is geared toward a narrower market of server-class computers than the multitude of desktop PC's, but it seems like they still need some bugs worked out.

Personally, I have been using Fedora Core 3 (on which RHEL 4 is apparently based) for several months now, and I'm seriously considering downgrading to a more mature release the next time I replace my hard drives, and then just installing piecemeal upgrades of various applications as needed. Most of my trouble with the 2.6.x kernel comes from poor driver support: I haven't had accelerated 3D graphics or been able to record CD-R's since upgrading, VMware takes at least ten seconds to set up its dynamic virtual device nodes every time the system boots, and I recently discovered that the driver for the RAID controller I was going to buy has had some serious stability problems (NOT good for a RAID array!).

The company I work for has around twenty licenses for RedHat Enterprise Linux, and I know they're not going to adopt RHEL 4.0 anytime soon. Half of their servers still run RedHat 7.1, due to in-house application stability problems with Apache 2.0 and Perl 5.8. The other servers can't even install anything later than 3.0 update 1, because installs are done over the network and update 2 introduced problems with the ethernet driver our servers use.

As much as I'd like to have leading-edge software and all the latest security patches, as administrator of a network that has to maintain at least 99.5% uptime (and preferably 99.99%), stability is the top priority.

Re:I think it's still premature

[avida]

Every RHEL major version is supported for five years at least. This is why you go with RHEL.

RHEL4 v Fedora3 ?

[slashmojo]

Is there anything/enough in rhel4 that isn't in fc3 to make it worth the upgrade? I'm using fc3 on a file server at the moment (switched from centos3.3 after endless problems with a 3ware9500 which fc3 only partially solved).

Anyone know if they fixed this rather serious problem yet?

dingdingding we have a winnah...

[doc_traig]

I run a tight shop and when WebSphere doesn't play ball on a production server for some reason I need to know that, as a last resort, I can scream at someone. Preferrably both the app and os people.

I haven't needed phone support yet, but if I did, I could go that route. And the clients like that. If they like it, it's successful.

Anti-RedHat bias?

[guacamole]

RHEL is the leading enterprise Linux distribution and RHEL 4 release is a _big_ news for most RHEL users but somehow Slashdot editors didn't deem it to be important enough to put the story on the slashdot front page. Coincidence? I think not..